After Suess Enterprises announced they would stop the publication of six Dr. Suess titles, prices exploded on eBay for vintage copies of the book. New copies were no longer available through major retailers such as Barnes & Nobles and Amazon, who warned buyers that four of the books were out of print with “limited availability.” eBay, one of the world’s largest online retailers, announced they would no longer allow sellers to list the books and that they would be banned from re-sale.
The six publications being banned for re-sale include: “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street,” “If I Ran the Zoo,” “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!,” and “The Cat’s Quizzer.” They were banned and pulled from the marketplace due to “racist and offensive” images. Listings and auctions for the six books had appeared on the eBay platform and priced in the hundreds for vintage copies of the books that were listed for as little as $4.44 over the past week. Some copies of “And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street” were going for $1,500 on eBay.
“At eBay, we have a strict policy against hate and discrimination to ensure our platform remains a safe, trusted, and inclusive environment for our global community of buyers and sellers. We’re currently sweeping our marketplace to remove these items. It can take some time to review all existing listings and provide education to impacted users. We’re also monitoring the newly published list to be reviewed,” eBay’s Parmita Choudhury said.
EBay’s offensive material policy states that they do not allow items or listings that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination. The company’s policy ban includes slavery items, slurs or epithets, items with racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise demeaning portrayals, Confederate battle flags, historical Holocaust-related and Nazi-related items, and media identified as Nazi propaganda.
Some eBay users noted that while eBay has banned the Dr. Suess titles, it continues to let people sell and purchase Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. To the radical left, Dr. Suess is too problematic to exist on eBay’s platform but Adolf Hitler is perfectly okay.
There is also a listing for a copy of Disney’s “Song of the South,” an early animated feature that the company has largely pulled from publication, similar to those of Dr. Suess Enterprises. eBay has also continued the sales of Benito Mussolini’s “Doctrine of Fascism,” Joseph Stalin’s “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR,” North Korea’s Kim Il Sung’s books, “The Anarchist Cookbook,” a book that instructs how to build explosive devices and other weapons, as well as a variety of products celebrating Louis Farrakhan.
President Joe Biden has also erased Dr. Suess from the annual “Read Across America Day,” which is held on or near March 2, which is the legendary author’s birthday. Even though eBay continues to sell bomb-making manuals, apparently nothing is as damaging (to the liberals) as hurting one’s feeling these days. Banning books has never been on the right side of an argument.
